Our friend The Custodian recommended this one to me a while back.
As many of you know, he loves everything about space flight -- the
technology, the experiences of astronauts, the mystery and
adventure and romance of putting people in a metal box and lighting
explosives under them until they're pushed up out of Earth's atmosphere.
He got to attend one of the last shuttle launches,
which he recorded as one of the high points in his life. He said he read
"Orbiter," and it made him want to cry with happiness. That was a hell
of a recommendation, so I went out and picked it up.

The story is set a few years in our future -- the Space Shuttle
Venture mysteriously vanished a decade ago, and the resulting scandal
caused the space program to be completely shut down. NASA is no more.
Kennedy Space Center is one vast squatters camp.

And then, from out of nowhere, the Venture returns. No one knows
where it's been or why it took so long to come back. Only one member of
the Venture's crew, John Cost, the pilot, is aboard, and he's insane.
There's dust from Mars in the shuttle's landing gear.

So the government calls in some experts to investigate the mystery.
There's Michelle Robeson, a former astronaut assigned to study the
shuttle itself and try to figure out where the Venture has been for the
past decade. There's Terry Marx, a hotshot young physicist who has to
figure out what sort of changes were made to the shuttle while it was
gone. And there's Anna Bracken, a psychiatrist who needs to analyze
the Venture's sole remaining crewman to try to make him less violently
insane.

The story didn't affect me as strongly as it did Custo, because I'm
not a space fanatic like he is -- but I still liked it a lot. The
characters have excellent backstories and motivations that blend into
the needs of the story very well. The mystery alone makes the book a
page-turner -- a space shuttle with skin? A space shuttle that
apparently landed on Mars? What the heck? Makes you want to read the
book just to find out what is going on.

Colleen Doran's artwork is great, too. If you're used to her art on
comics like "A Distant Soil," her work here is a bit different, but
still really beautiful and vivid. She does some really jaw-dropping
landscapes of distant planets and stars.

The toughest thing for me to handle was all the theoretical science
that Ellis includes in the story. I have a tough time really
understanding serious, hard science, especially physics. (Frankly, I
have trouble doing long division.) But even for a science-dim guy like
me, the science Ellis hits us with -- even if it's theoretical and maybe
a liiiiittle bit crazy -- is thrilling, nearly magical stuff.

If you love space travel the way Warren Ellis and Colleen Doran do,
you'll love this. If you like hard science fiction or physics, you'll
probably like this. If you love mysteries, you'll probably like this. If
you're a fan of Ellis or Doran, you should definitely have this on your
shelf. In other words, go pick it up.